Category: Articles

On December 2 the House of Commons voted by 397 to 223 in favour of UK air strikes in Syria. Under the leadership of Hilary Benn, shadow foreign secretary, there were 66 Labour MPs who took advantage of the free vote offered by Jeremy Corbyn and openly sided with the ill-considered imperialist operations in Syria – even 10 Conservatives rebelled, such were their worries. After his closing speech Benn was cheered and congratulated not only by the 67 pro-war Labour MPs, but by front-bench Tories, members of the Democratic Unionist Party and Liberal Democrats. He is the leader of their Labour Party.

What lies behind the Mecca tragedy?

On September 24, the Saudi authorities told the world that 769 pilgrims had been killed and 863 injured during what was described as a “stampede” in Mecca, as Muslim pilgrims were beginning the Hajj ritual. A few days later, however, it was claimed that Saudi officials had given Indian and Pakistani diplomats 1,100 photographs of different corpses, and it was only after these revelations that Riyadh admitted the death toll was even higher.

According to Tehran, at least 246 of the dead and 630 of those injured were Iranians. Amongst those missing and presumed dead at the time of writing was Iran’s former ambassador to Lebanon, Ghazanfar Roknabadi. Saudi administrators denied he was in Mecca, but Tehran produced a short film of him addressing Shia crowds during this year’s Hajj. Official figures released by Saudi authorities had the number of Iranian deaths at 131 – the largest national contingent (the second largest being Moroccans, of whom 88 are believed to have died).

Later the Iranian broadcaster, Press TV, quoted Saeed Ohadi, the head of Iran’s Hajj and Pilgrimage organisation, who predicted there would be “3,000 to 3,200 bodies” in the 21 containers where the dead had been placed – clearly an exaggerated figure.1 The Iranian official claimed that “imprudence, irresponsibility and the mismanagement of the Saudi authorities are the main factors behind the tragic incident”.2 Iran’s Islamic republic has done its utmost to place the entire blame on the Saudi authorities, challenging the kingdom’s competence to run this “important event in the Islamic calendar”.

Iran’s supreme leader, ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for an investigation, and his demand was echoed by every Friday prayer leader in the country, prompting religious zealots to pour to the streets. Instructions from mosques were sent by text, urging Shias to demonstrate, in what was labelled “spontaneous protests”. Supporters of the regime, carrying black flags, shouted: “The Saudi regime is a friend of Satan” (part of the Hajj ritual consists of pilgrims throwing stones at ‘Satan’). One paper, Tasnim, carried a cartoon showing king Salman of Saudi Arabia as a camel riding over pilgrims and ayatollah Mohammad Kashani, addressing Friday prayers in Tehran, called on the Organisation of Islamic Countries to take over responsibility for Hajj, since the Saudi authorities were “incapable” of running it.

The war of words between the two regional powers rapidly escalated, with Saudi Arabia categorically denying “misleading and distorted allegations” about inappropriate road closures that it alleged had been started by Iranian state-controlled media. Iran’s allies were repeating the same claims, with Iraq’s discredited former prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, stating that the disaster was “proof of the incompetence of the organisers of the pilgrimage season” – a bit rich, coming from a leader who lost two of his country’s major cities, Mosul and Tikrit, to Islamic State in 2014, through incompetence and corruption. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah added his voice to the Shia chorus, saying the Hajj tragedy reflected a “malfunction in the administration”.3

Originally the Saudi authorities had claimed that African pilgrims had disobeyed instructions given by the Hajj authorities blocking the route of the procession. However, Press TV (not the most reliable source of information) countered that “the convoy of prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, the son of Saudi king Salman bin Abdulaziz, had arrived at the site, forcing the pilgrims to change their original directions”.4Whereupon the Saudi media changed its story and Sabq News quoted unnamed “eyewitnesses”, who claimed that the “stampede” was actually caused by Iranian pilgrims. This was followed by a comment from Dr Khalid al-Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family, who used his Twitter account to claim that “the time has come to think – in a serious way – about banning ‘Iranians’ from coming to Mecca, for the safety of the pilgrims”.5

The official Saudi response was more measured, with prince Mohammed bin Naff Al Saudi, the country’s ambassador to the United Kingdom and Ireland, stating: “Claims that the stampede occurred following road closures because of a ministerial event or a dignitaries’ convoy are false.”6 However, Iran is not the only source claiming road closures played a part in the tragedy. On September 29 The Daily Telegraph quoted Libyan pilgrim Ahead Abu Barr as saying: “The police had closed all entrances and exits to the pilgrims’ camp, leaving only one.”7

To add insult to injury, Saudi Arabia’s highest-ranking cleric, Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, implied that nothing could have been done to prevent the tragedy. He told Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Nayef: “As for the things that humans cannot control, you are not blamed for them. Fate and destiny are inevitable.”8 Unsurprisingly, Iranian president Hassan Rowhani disagreed and demanded an international enquiry.

Incompetence

As I have said, the Islamic republic’s allegations about Saudi culpability are exaggerated, but there is no doubt that Riyadh’s incompetence in running the only major annual event they host should be exposed and condemned. This is not the first time that hundreds of Hajj pilgrims have died. In 1990 in a stampede in a pedestrian tunnel, 1,426 pilgrims lost their lives – most of them Malaysians, Indonesians and Pakistanis (the Saudi authorities encourage groups of each nationality to walk together). On top of that, incidents in May 1994, April 1998, March 2001, February 2003, February 2004 and January 2006 cost the lives of pilgrims – around 3,000 have perished in the last 20 years.

Given the Saudi royal family’s pride in hosting the event, the direct responsibility falls on the crown prince himself, who just happens to be minister of the interior. It is truly incomprehensible why even such a bureaucratic dictatorship cannot organise a better process, ensuring the safety of the pilgrims as they progress through the various stages of Hajj.

Hajj is the fifth ‘pillar’ of Islam – the other four being Shahadah (testimony to a single god and acceptance of Muhammad as his prophet), Salat (physical and spiritual worship), Zakat (obligatory religious tax), and Sawm (fasting during daylight hours in the month of Ramadan). According to Islamic belief, every Muslim man or woman should undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca, should they be healthy and financially able to do so. The ceremony involves wearing a simple white cloth (hiram) – the idea being to strip away all distinctions of wealth, class, status and culture. Not quite true: in the first place, the cost of travel only allows the wealthy to attend Hajj, especially when it comes to believers from east Asia or Africa.

According to Basharat Peer, an Indian journalist who has written on Mecca,

You could be an Arab prince, you could be a south Asian construction worker, you could be an Afghan warlord … you are all wearing the same clothes and you just walk through this barren landscape and it is miserably hot. But when you look a little more carefully what you see is that even during the Hajj the distinctions of wealth and class do not disappear.9

The Saudi authorities have helped ensure such class distinction by overseeing the building of luxury hotels, where wealthy Muslims pay astronomical sums for rooms with a view of the Kaaba – the black stone structure in the middle of the Grand Mosque. The experience of the wealthy pilgrims is very different from that of the poorer ones, who suffer in the often sweltering heat in camp sites or hostels with no air conditioning.

As with everything else relating to Islamic economics, the ownership of land and capital are key factors. The cost of Hajj might be paid by the pilgrims, but the real price is obtained from the surplus value of workers, whose exploitation allows the Muslim shopkeeper or workshop owner to undertake the pilgrimage.

Hajjis from Iran are often representatives of the upper layers of the petty bourgeoisie and small capital, on whose support the regime relies. Traditionally, the aristocracy and the nouveaux riches (who have accumulated huge fortunes under the Islamic republic) prefer to spend their wealth in holiday resorts in Europe or North America, while the less well-off middle classes and those who cannot afford to travel far would escape up Turkey, Dubai or anywhere near Iran’s border, where they can take a break free from strict Islamic regulation regarding dress, alcohol consumption, etc.

After over 36 years of unpopular rule, then, Iran’s Shia clerics can only rely a petty-bourgeois minority – primarily the bazaaris and shopkeepers, the section of the population that tends to be obsessed by Hajj. Hence the regime’s overzealous response to the Mecca tragedy, which can be blamed in its entirety on Iran’s arch-enemy, Saudi Arabia.

However, it is a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. After all, Iran’s Islamic government cannot guarantee the health and safety of Iranian workers or flight passengers – let alone its political prisoners (many of whom ‘accidentally’ die in the regime’s many prisons).

Did outrage caused by the provocations of an irreverent magazine provoke the Paris attacks? Yassamine Mather looks beyond this simplistic myth

Afghan mujahedin: paid for by Washington

first published in the Weekly Worker

On Sunday January 11, according to France’s ministry of interior, at least 3.7 million people marched across France to support the freedom of the press. As many on the left have pointed out, the demonstration in Paris was led by some of the most appalling political leaders in the world – some of them war criminals, others responsible for a long list of crimes against humanity, others authors of legislation against freedom of speech in their own country. But all were apparently united by their desire to defend freedom of the press, following last week’s horrific attacks in Paris.

No-one in their right mind can believe that that the attacks were simply the result of Islamists’ reaction to the cartoons printed by the Charlie Hebdo authors, yet the bourgeois media have done such a good job of manipulating the headlines that millions of people throughout the world, including many on the ‘left’, are under the impression this was simply an issue of ‘freedom of the press’. Rarely in recent years have we seen such oversimplification and indeed misrepresentation of facts, leading to mass hysteria.

Don’t get me wrong: there was no conspiracy here. The misrepresentation was an inevitable consequence of the way the bourgeois media simplify complicated stories, using attention-grabbing headlines, which may be glanced at on mobile devices and social media by people who do not read the full story.

There were exceptions to this rule and, as Robert Fisk reflected in The Independent,

Maybe all newspaper and television reports should carry a ‘history corner’, a little reminder that nothing – absolutely zilch – happens without a past. Massacres, bloodletting, fury, sorrow, police hunts (‘widening’ or ‘narrowing’, as sub-editors wish) take the headlines. Always it’s the ‘who’ and the ‘how’ – but rarely the ‘why’. In this case the situation was worse – the why wasn’t what the headlines wanted us to believe.1

Of course, no-one is claiming that “the why” should be used to justify these horrific murders, but in this particular case the media’s version – shootings caused by cartoons disrespectful of Mohammed – is just plain wrong. In fact, had they paid any attention to “the who”, they would have found better answers in regard to “the why”. We now know the event had everything to do with previous and current wars in north Africa and the Middle East. The gunmen had military training, they were associated with one or more al Qa’eda group in Algeria and Yemen, they also had connections with Islamic State and/or al Qa’eda in Syria.

A video released on January 11 shows Amedy Coulibaly, the gunman who seized hostages in the kosher supermarket, pledging allegiance to IS. He says he was working with Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, those responsible for the Charlie Hebdo outrage: “We have split our team into two … to increase the impact of our actions.”2 These claims were repeated in an interview Coulibaly gave to an affiliate channel of CNN during the siege. There is some confusion about this, because the Kouachi brothers said they were sent by al Qa’eda in Yemen, otherwise known as al Qa’eda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which has now claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks. In his own, separate interview with BFM TV, Chérif Kouachi also explained that he had been in contact with Anwar al Awlaki, an AQAP cleric.3

As Frank Gardner points out in BBC online,

Despite sharing a violent, west-hating jihadist ideology, the two organisations have largely been in competition. In Syria this has sometimes erupted into open warfare, as their respective followers jockey for territory, while their leaders jockey for global influence …

So is it possible that leaders of the two most dangerous jihadist organisations have agreed to bury their differences and cooperate in a joint attack on France? It is not inconceivable, but it is unlikely. Far more plausible is the idea that, with or without the tacit blessings of both al Qa’eda and IS, the three attackers decided to pool their resources and form a plan on their own.4

The brothers had allegedly attended a mosque in a northern suburb of Paris, where they came under the influence of a radical imam called Farid Benyettou and through him came into contact with Boubaker al-Hakim, a militant linked to al Qa’eda in Iraq, according to Middle East expert Jean-Pierre Filiu. Hakim had recruited jihadists to fight in Fallujah in the mid-2000s.5

Politicisation

Moreover, the brothers were not ‘radicalised’ because of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons: they were politicised by the wars in the Middle East. So why did they choose the offices of a satirical magazine as a target? Because it was a soft target and was very convenient. For them it was a military operation – this was confirmed by comments made to hostages they took in both the Charlie Hebdo offices and the print works where they later took refuge. The two brothers told a salesman that they did not kill civilians! According to an interview given by the manager of the print works, “I brought them the coffee and they were very respectful, calling me monsieur, like gentlemen.”

For all their barbarism all three believed themselves to be soldiers of Islam. The younger brother, Chérif, had a long history of jihadism and anti-Semitism, according to documents obtained by CNN. In a 400-page court record, he is described as wanting to go to Iraq through Syria “to fight the Americans … I was ready to go and die in battle,” he said in a deposition. “I got this idea when I saw the injustices shown by television … I am speaking about the torture that the Americans have inflicted on the Iraqis.”6

In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the preferred target of the jihadists was the US embassy. However, the three knew that they would get nowhere near the well fortified US building in Paris. To a lesser extent the same argument is valid in terms of targeting major government ministries and offices – although, as many leftwing commentators have pointed out, why target a government whose agencies had until recently supported Islamic groups? France was promoting the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, long before the United States got involved and supported anyone who fought Bashar al-Assad in Syria (both are countries with a history of French colonial intervention). So the jihadists were looking for an easy target – a building where there was no security, easy to access and easy to escape from.

The brothers had military training in Yemen: they were volunteering and recruiting others for jihad in Iraq and later in Syria, while in their youth they had had a life very similar to many second-generation immigrants before they changed. Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books summarises this well:

The circumstances that attract young men and women to these groups are creations of the western world that they inhabit – which is itself a result of long years of colonial rule in the countries of their forebears. We know that the Parisian brothers, Chérif and Saïd Kouachi, were long-haired inhalers of marijuana and other substances until (like the July 7 bombers in this country) they saw footage of the Iraq war and, in particular, of the torture taking place in Abu Ghraib and the cold-blooded killings of Iraqi citizens in Fallujah.

They sought comfort in the mosque. Here they were radicalised by waiting hardliners, for whom the west’s war on terror had become a golden opportunity to recruit and hegemonise the young, both in the Muslim world and in the ghettoes of Europe and North America. Sent first to Iraq to kill Americans and more recently to Syria (with the connivance of the French state?) to topple Assad, such young men were taught how to use weapons effectively. Back home they got ready to deploy this knowledge against those who they believed were tormenting them in difficult times. They were the persecuted. Charlie Hebdo represented their persecutors. The horror should not blind us to this reality.7

The Kouachi brothers were indeed politicised by the war in Iraq, by atrocities in Abu Ghraib, by the carpet bombing of Fallujah. At a time when anti-war movements had fizzled out or been rendered useless by soft politics, and in the absence of a revolutionary left, they signed up to the Islamists. Nothing justifies the horrific crimes committed in Paris last week, but the ‘international community’ and to a certain extent we on the international left must take a share of the blame. Where were the demonstrations when Fallujah and other Iraqi cities were being bombed? What have we done about war crimes in Iraq? In Afghanistan? So far only the whistleblowers – those who exposed the torture – are in jail, while war criminals from Bush and Blair to the CIA directors in charge of that torture remain at large. There is no justice for the victims of Abu Ghraib or for the survivors of Fallujah.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, writing in the Huffington Post, sums it up:

And when the horrific assassinations of 12 media people and the wounding of another 12 media workers resulted in justifiable outrage around the world, did you ever wonder why there wasn’t an equal outrage at the tens of thousands of innocent civilians killed by the American intervention in Iraq or the over a million civilians killed by the US in Vietnam, or why president Obama refused to bring to justice the CIA torturers of mostly Muslim prisoners, thereby de facto giving future torturers the message that they need not even be sorry for their deeds (indeed, former vice-president Cheney boldly asserted he would order that kind of torture again without thinking twice)?

So don’t be surprised if people around the world, while condemning the despicable acts of the murderers in Paris and grieving for their families and friends, remain a bit cynical about the media circus surrounding this particular outrage, while the western media quickly forgets the equally despicable acts of systematic murder and torture that western countries have been involved in. Or perhaps a bit less convinced that western societies are really the best hope for civilisation

…. the violence is an inevitable consequence of a world which systematically dehumanizes so many people who are made to feel powerless and despairing and deeply depressed about the possibility of finding the milk of human kindness anywhere.8

The reality is that capitalism has created this atomised world, where the life of a European or American is valued more than that of hundreds of victims of the war on terror in the Middle East, Afghanistan and north Africa.

Media role

A significant contributor to this situation is the mass media and the way they report war, terrorism and murder, which has a crucial role in the subsequent mobilisation of public opinion. Early in the Iraq adventure, the BBC tried to express a slightly more balanced view of Tony Blair’s reasons for wanting to go to war, by exposing the ‘dodgy dossier’ prepared by Alistair Campbell – let us remember what happened to that exercise. The director general of the BBC was forced to resign, the broadcasters involved were replaced, the journalists sidelined. The Hutton enquiry legitimised this novel way of dealing with the issue of freedom of the press. No wonder we no longer see and hear any investigative journalism from that quarter. As I have often told Iranian comrades, in the west there is no need for censorship of the media: the prevalent unconscious self-censorship guarantees their compliance with the status quo.

Of course, in the Middle East the official and unofficial media have their own problems of state and religious censorship and, in the absence of a media outlet trusted by the majority of the population, exaggerated news of massacres and torture found on social media or jihadi websites substitute for facts. Whatever the number of those killed in Fallujah, most Iraqis, Egyptians, Jordanians, etc believe it to be 10 times more. Most of us have had to look away when the horrific images from Abu Ghraib torture chambers have appeared. However, none of those images equal the Photoshopped versions that went viral in social media and unofficial websites in the Middle East. Whoever was circulating that particular video was intent on creating as much disgust as possible so as to incite a reaction. While barbaric wars are sanitised for western audiences, citizens of Middle Eastern and north African countries are exposed to exaggerated and at times false reporting of their horrors. This has contributed to the irrational response to capitalist barbarism by the jihadists.

The email sent to his staff by Al Jazeera English editor and executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr has been circulating on the web: “Please accept this note in the spirit it is intended – to make our coverage the best it can be. We are Al Jazeera!” he gave his “suggestions” as to how the Qatar-based news outlet should cover the story. “Khadr urged his employees to ask if this was ‘really an attack on free speech’, discuss whether ‘I am Charlie’ is an ‘alienating slogan’, caution viewers against ‘making this a free speech aka European values’ under attack binary [sic]’ and portray the attack as ‘a clash of extremist fringes’.9

Of course, Al Jazeera is in an unenviable position – caught between, on the one hand, the sensitivities of Qatari rulers, who have contributed or at least turned a blind eye to funds sent to IS, and, on the other, a loyal audience gained through better representation of the Arab world than what western-based media feed us. In fact for all its many faults, the channel remains one of the more reliable sources of information about the Middle East.

Islam and violence

The events in Paris, as well as the well publicised beheading of western prisoners by IS, have initiated a debate about the inherently violent nature of Islam. If you read recent comments on this subject, including some from Iranian ‘lefts’, you might come to the conclusion that violence is a genetic characteristic among Muslims, irrespective of their nationality.

As a lifelong communist opponent of the Islamic Republic in Iran, I have no sympathy with political Islam. However, it would be a mistake to claim that Islam is more violent than other religions. It is wrong to talk about the recent violent attacks by Islamists without looking at contemporary precedents. One can easily trace al Qa’eda violence, later taken up by IS, to the Afghan war of the 1980s and in this respect there is no more authoritative commentator than Hillary Clinton, who in December 2011 admitted that that the US government created and funded Al Qa’eda in order to fight the Soviet Union.10

According to Joe Stephens and David Ottaway, CIA-supplied school books depicting violent images have played an important part in promoting jihadist violence. Writing in the Washington Post, they say:

The United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings – part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation. The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.

One page from the texts of that period shows a resistance fighter with a bandolier and a Kalashnikov slung from his shoulder. The soldier’s head is missing. Above the soldier is a verse from the Koran. Below is a Pashtu tribute to the mujahedin, who are described as obedient to Allah. Such men will sacrifice their wealth and life itself to impose Islamic law on the government, the text says.11

The CIA was also concerned about tribal and regional factionalism in Afghanistan and decided that Arab zealots who joined the jihad were more reliable and easier to train than the rivalry-ridden Pashtouns, Daris, etc. So Osama bin Laden, along with a small groups of militants from Pakistan, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, became the agency’s allies in the war against Moscow.

According to veteran journalist Robert Dreyfuss,

For half a century the United States and many of its allies saw what I call the ‘Islamic right’ as convenient partners in the cold war. In the decades before 9/11, hard-core activists and organisations among Muslim fundamentalists on the far right were often viewed as allies for two reasons: because they were seen as fierce anti-communists and because they opposed secular nationalists, such as Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh.12

That was not all. After the coming to power of the first major Islamic state in the Middle East, Iran’s Islamic Republic, for all the anti-Iran rhetoric we heard from the US and its western allies, they took a very ‘pragmatic’ line towards the violence meted out by that regime against its leftwing opponents. In the early 1980s, and later in 1987, Tehran executed large numbers of communists and socialists – the figures are unreliable, but conservative estimates would be that at least around 8,000 were killed by the Shia regime. Did the western media sympathise with them? No, that violence was not considered a problem. In the same period, Alan Clark, Margaret Thatcher’s close advisor, boasted about selling arms to both Iran and Iraq, in a war where half a million people lost their lives. Ronald Reagan and Oliver North were involved in the arms trade with Iran under the auspices of Irangate.

Iran’s violence against its own citizens continued into the 2000s . In the autumn of 2001, ‘rogue’ elements from Iran’s ministry of intelligence executed a number of secular/leftwing writers in what became known on the Iranian left as serial political murders. This was an unprecedentedly violent campaign against innocent individuals.

In December 2001, I received a recording of secret interrogations held by Iran’s ministry of intelligence. With help from the National Union of Journalists we showed those DVDs at a press conference in the union’s headquarters in London. They show forced confessions, how some of the agents of the ministry of intelligence, including the wife of prime suspect Saeed Emami, were beaten, flogged and humiliated until they confessed that they worked for foreign powers, including the US and Israel. The NUJ and various Iranian leftwing groups had sent invitations to the media to attend the press conference, but the only British reporter present, apart from the representative from BBC Persian service, was from Indymedia. No-one from the major media outlets seemed concerned that Iranian writers were being executed on the streets of Tehran by religious zealots. Iran’s president, Mohammad Khatami, was then considered an ally, so no-one cared about those writers in Tehran, or about press freedom in Iran.

It is incidents such as this that makes me very cynical about the outpouring of sentiment over Charlie Hebdo.

Islam and tolerance

Zealots in every religion hate ridicule directed against their deities, but the current consensus is that Muslims are more intolerant than others. But, just like jihadi violence, such intolerance is yet another gift from the CIA guidebooks of the 1980s. In order to whip up anger, the jihadists were encouraged to react to any infringement of Islam by secular governments in Afghanistan with violence. Intolerance of others, as propagated by political Islam, is a modern phenomenon.

During my childhood , one of my mother’s best loved books was Twenty-three years: a study of the prophetic career of Mohammed. The author, Ali Dashti, disproves through rational argument the miracles of the prophet Mohammed – events that are central to the Islamic faith. He argues against the commonly held Islamic myth that the Quran was the work of god, a divine inspiration sent to an illiterate Mohammed. Dashti also points out that the stories in the Quran are all identical or slightly varied versions of those in the Bible or the Torah, that Mohammed had heard these stories during trade trips he made to what is now Syria. More damaging than that, Dashti claims Mohammed married a rich old widow, Khadija, in order to gain financial advantage and subsequently married a number of younger women, including a very young girl who was supposed to have been his daughter-in-law. Dashti’s book could be found in many Iranian households, and even religious Shias had no problem discussing its contents.

My uncle, who was a practising Shia, kept a copy of Maxim Rodinson’s 1961 book Mohammed on his bookshelf. Rodinson, a Marxist and professor of oriental languages, wrote this biography of the prophet’s life from a sociological point of view – it was clearly blasphemous, as far as believers are concerned.

So how did today’s Islamic intolerance begin? We can trace its beginnings to the infamous CIA guidebooks for jihadists, written by Saudi/Wahhabi fundamentalists, with the purpose of inciting hatred against leftwing forces.

Yet, irrespective of this history, we have to say there can be no exceptions, as far as freedom of expression is concerned. There is no reason why Islam should be a special case in this regard. In fact to call on publications not to make derogatory remarks about Mohammed, as opposed to Jesus or Moses, is to admit Muslims are less tolerant than other believers. Such an attitude would pave the way to further discrimination against Muslims.

Yassamine Mather assesses the latest extension of negotiations between Iran and the 5+1 powers

John Kerry: to the deadline and beyond

On November 24, for the second time in a year, Iran and the 5+1 world powers failed to reach an agreement over Tehran’s nuclear programme, and the deadline for finding a ‘comprehensive’ deal had to be extended yet again.

Despite the easing of sanctions and the mixed messages in Tehran, writes Yassamine Mather, the Islamic regime is thoroughly committed to the capitalist free market, not the welfare of the masses

Revolutionary Guards: guardians of counter-revolution

In the early hours of Monday January 19, centrifuges used for the enrichment of uranium up to 20% were switched off in Natanz nuclear plant as part of Iran’s agreement to halt enrichment of uranium above 5% purity, and the ‘neutralising’ of its stockpile of 20%-enriched uranium was begun. These were the first steps towards disposing of all the country’s stockpile of 20%-enriched uranium within six months.

Yassamine Mather of Hands off the People of Iran examines the failure of political Islam and imperialism’s attempts to adjust its alliances

John Kerry: Behind the scenes maneuvering

Irrespective of what happens in 2014, the year 2013 will be remembered as a year of historic changes in Iran-US relations. For the first time in 34 years, a US president has spoken to his Iranian equivalent, and the two countries’ foreign ministers have held face-to-face negotiations as well as a number of phone conversations. Contrary to what the supporters of the reformist movement in Iran claim, the dramatic changes in Iran-US relations are not simply a consequence of the June 2013 elections and the coming to office of a ‘moderate’ president in Iran. We now know that secret meetings between US and Iranian officials took place in Oman last year, during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency. According to a senior US official quoted by Associated Press, US foreign secretary John Kerry visited Oman in May 2013, “ostensibly to push a military deal with the sultanate but secretly focused on maintaining that country’s key mediation role”.

Vazir Fathi ( Rahyaab) was born in April 1963. He was a political prisoner during “the Decade of Sixties”- 1980’s- and is a survivor of the massacre of “sixty seven”. He was arrested in February of 1983 and was formally released in July of 1992.Vazir started writing poetry in the “Eveen ” prison in 1986 and he wrote his first poem in the solitary cell.

The experience of the struggles, imprisonments, tortures, hangings, executions and resistance of those years and specially the experience of the horrible massacre of his comrades in the year of 67 left an indelible and lasting effect on his poetry. the manifestations of this are visibly demonstrated in all his work. Vazir, even after his release from prison, maintained a direct presence in the industrial areas populated by workers. He worked along side of workers, technicians and engineers. By participating in their struggles, he shared in their successes and defeats, happiness and misery and was able to experience true workers poetry and literature in their authentic format. He has integrated and reflected this experience in his poems.

Rahyaab’s poems were not published before 2008, with one or two exceptions that got him in trouble with the Ministry of Information. During this period, some of his poems were ,occasionally, circulated in closed circles. In 2008, he adopted the pen name “Rahyaab” on the recommendation of some friends and to facilitate wide access to his work. Consequently, he began publishing some of his poems on the internet abroad and received broad notice and acceptance.

Vazir Fathi, after 16 years of dealing with the tight control of the Islamic Republic and bearing the difficulties of recurrent arrests and interrogations and living under the Sword of Damocles, finally in August 2010 opted to enter on the path of immigration and sough political asylum in Turkey. His family, being placed on the list of those restricted from leaving the country and undergoing a lot of legal harassment by the Ministries of Information and Investigation for 9 months, was finally able to join him there.

Rahyaab’s poetry was regularly and on related occasions published in various places and received wide attention from various readers; as their comments and emails reflected. Moreover, an extensive review on the poem ” darafsh ma” by M. Hejri was published on some Internet sites. This review represents a valuable attempt to appreciate this poem: as well, it is an analysis of the contents and concepts contained in it which reveals the literary orientation and viewpoint of the poet.

Aside from his literary work, Vazir Fathi has published numerous political writings about the conditions and massacre of political prisoners in Iran.

“Camomile in the Desert” is his collection of poems that is now available in print under his name. It contains some of his newest poems, as well as new-style and old forms of poetry such as Lyrics, Couplets and Quatrains. As well, he conducted a radio interview with Mr. Michael Slate from Radio KPfK, in September 2012, reviewing the infamous massacre of political prisoners of 1988 in Iran. The link for this interview is attached below:

Yassamine Mather advocates a boycott and stresses the need for regime change from below

On May 22, the US moved closer to imposing a full trade embargo against Iran, as the Senate reaffirmed US support for Israel – should it be “compelled to attack Tehran’s nuclear programme in self-defence”.

The Senate voted unanimously to adopt a non-binding resolution urging Barack Obama to fully enforce existing economic sanctions against Iran and to “provide diplomatic, military and economic support” to Israel “in its defence of its territory, people and existence”.

On the same day the Republican-dominated foreign affairs committee of the House of Representatives unanimously approved new proposals for sanctions. If passed into law, these would blacklist all countries or companies that fail to reduce their oil imports from Iran to virtually nil in the next 180 days. In other words, it aims to close off Iran’s main source of income.

All this is happening in the middle of an election farce in Tehran. A day before the Senate resolutions, Iran’s religious supervisory body, the Guardian Council, announced the final list of eight candidates it deemed acceptable to contest the presidential elections on June 14. It did not include either the former president and main hope of the ‘reformists’, Hashemi Rafsanjani, or the outgoing president’s chosen successor, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei.

Although the remaining candidates all promise to ‘resolve the nuclear issue’, the US administration has made up its mind: bar a miracle, conflict with Iran, most likely in the form of Israeli air attacks, is now inevitable. Even if one of the remaining centrist or ‘reformist’ candidates gets elected, Washington does not believe such an individual will be strong enough to convince the country’s supreme leader of the need to compromise. By all accounts, Rafsanjani was the only candidate capable of arguing the case for ayatollah Ali Khamenei to ‘drink the poison’ and make a U-turn either on the nuclear programme or on Syria.

Whoever gets elected on June 14, Iranians are resigning themselves to the fact that confrontation with the west will continue, and so crippling sanctions and devastating economic hardship will persist. The supreme leader had promised an ‘epic year’, when massive participation in the elections would prove the nation’s tenacity in confronting the foreign enemy. But the final list of mediocre candidates will make it difficult for even the most hard-line supporters of the regime to muster any enthusiasm.

No-one should underestimate the severity of the current situation. Iran is completely isolated internationally and regionally, while its support for the Syrian government has brought it into direct conflict with Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and the Muslim Brotherhood, in addition to the usual suspects. Economically the country is bankrupt.

Life is getting excruciatingly hard for most Iranians – even some among the middle classes are finding the price of basic goods beyond their means, and one can only imagine the hardship faced by the increasingly unemployed working class.

When ‘targeted’ sanctions were proposed by the US, its supporters claimed only the rulers of the regime would suffer and ordinary Iranians would hardly notice the effects. Reality could not be further from this pledge. For example, in theory medicines were exempt from sanctions. However, the current rate of exchange means that many are beyond Iran’s means. In addition most pharmaceutical companies have stopped exporting to Iran. The consequence is that Iranians are dying because of acute shortage of medicine and surgical equipment – not to mention dangerous black market fakes and imitations. The US war against Iran has long started.

Candidates

Now that the TV debates and official campaigning have begun, all the candidates claim they will deal with the country’s economic problems. Speaking at an election conference at the University of Tehran, Ali Akbar Velayati, who is one of the supreme leader’s senior advisors, said if he wins the election he will prioritise the resolution of economic issues.

Mohsen Rezai, former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, brags about a new system of “economic federalism”. He will “fight poverty and unemployment” by empowering the provinces to manage their own economy.1 Mohammad Qalibaf, who is appealing to the middle classes and the private sector, is defending “positive competition” and “better integration into the global economy” through “expertise-oriented” economic management.2

Ayatollah Khamenei keeps saying he has no favourite candidate – it must be difficult to choose from amongst all those trusted nominees. The final list of presidential candidates includes not only Velayati, but Haddad Adel, who is Khamenei’s son’s father-in-law, and two of Khamenei’s personal appointees to the Supreme National Security Council, Saeed Jalili and Hassan Rohani. Qalibaf is a former police chief appointed by Khamenei, who is currently mayor of Tehran, while Rezai was the longest serving head of the Revolutionary Guards (1981-97).

All the presidential candidates except one, Jalili (ironically Iran’s main negotiator in the current talks with the 5+1 countries), claim they will resolve the nuclear issue. Jalili, who is said by some to be the supreme leader’s favourite and did his PhD thesis on “the foreign policy of the prophet Muhammad”, is himself a ‘living martyr’ (having lost a leg in the Iran-Iraq war) and his supporters’ slogan is: “No compromise. No submission. Only Jalili.” Clearly Iran’s chief negotiator is a master of diplomatic language, but at least Iranians now know why negotiations are going nowhere.

None of these candidates explain how, in the absence of a political solution and an end to sanctions, they will achieve the promised economic miracles. Iran cannot get payment for the limited oil it sells and the country’s banks have been excluded from the global banking system. Swift, which facilitates the majority of global payments, has disconnected Iranian financial firms from its messaging system. Food prices have gone up by 60% compared to last year, while factories are closing down every day, as transnationals move out of Iran (Peugeot, Saipa and Citroen have all closed down or reduced production); smaller service and spare parts suppliers are going bankrupt and do not pay their workers. The slogan dominating recent workers’ protests sums up the situation: “We are hungry”.

Of course, it would be wrong to blame all Iran’s economic problems on sanctions. For all the promises of moving away from a single-product economy, 34 years after the Islamic regime came into being, Iran remains a rentier state relying solely on oil exports. For many years Bank Markazi, Iran’s central bank, has used all the country’s income from oil exports to prop up the currency, the rial, causing hyperinflation, so it comes as no surprise that the oil embargo, combined with unprecedented increases in food prices, has brought Iran’s economy to its knees.

However, as I mentioned earlier, Iran’s economic problems are completely intertwined with its international political relations and here lies the problem.

Boycott

Of course any conflict has two sides and there are many reasons why the United States is committed to regime change in Iran: revenge for the overthrow of the shah, the US embassy hostage seizure, punishing a rogue state, the benefits of a rumbling conflict at a time of economic crises.

However, most Iranians, struggling to feed their families, are desperate to see the end of the current conflict and expect more from their ‘negotiators’. In this context it is understandable that sections of the Iranian opposition, mainly amongst the ‘reformist’ left, were tempted by Rafsanjani’s claims that he would start serious negotiations and ‘save the nation’. It is inevitable that sections of the population will ignore calls for a boycott of these elections and vote for Mohammad Aref or Hassan Rohani (the two remaining ‘reformists’). But ‘reformist’ leaders, including Rafsanjani and another former president, Mohammad Khatami, have yet to make up their mind if they will recommend a vote for any of the vetted candidates. They are considering running a poll amongst members/supporters of the green movement on whether they should stage a boycott.

There are a number of issues to consider when coming to that decision. First of all, there is no reason to believe that the US and its western allies would compromise. Supporters of participation would look pretty stupid if air raids or regime-change attempts happened under Aref or Rohani.

The second consideration relates to the left. Surely it would be completely compromised if it recommended voting for one of the above. This does not mean we should fall into the blind alley of always calling for a boycott when there is no working class candidate, irrespective of circumstances. The Bolsheviks debated and indeed participated in electoral processes where the choices were limited and the processes entirely undemocratic. However, choosing from amongst a religious dictator’s close advisors and nominees would certainly bring the left into disrepute.

The deteriorating situation has persuaded sections of the Iranian left to openly support regime change from above. In early May the Canadian government held a two-day ‘global dialogue conference’ at the University of Toronto, where foreign minister John Baird said: “The people of Iran deserve free and fair elections. Not another version of ayatollah Khamenei’s never-ending shell game of presidential puppets. Not the rise of a regressive clerical military dictatorship.”3 Also attending was Iran Tribunal prosecutor Payam Akhavan, who was quoted as saying: “Canada should continue to explore every avenue of assistance to civil society with a view to facilitating non-violent change.”4 Last weekend “republicans, leftists, constitutional monarchists and the green movement”5 joined forces to hold a two-day conference in Stockholm, at the invitation of the Swedish Democratic Party. They decided to form an umbrella organisation: United for Democracy in Iran.

In Hands Off the People of Iran we have always maintained that the Iranian people have to confront simultaneously two enemies: imperialism and their own rulers. Any compromise with either of these camps will tarnish the left and represent a betrayal of the interests of the working class. Adherence to this principle is as important today as it was in 2007, when Hopi was founded.